The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), its Affiliates and aligned civil society organisations will hold demonstrations across the country to protest the escalating cost of living on Friday, 19 June.
The cost of living in South Africa has reached crisis level with the price of basic goods rising faster than wages. Workers are taking home 47% less than they did 10 years ago in real terms, while in the last five years electricity and fuel combined have increased by 80%; water by 42%; food by 45%; and medical insurance by 58%.
Households are under extreme pressure to make ends meet and are borrowing, not to buy luxuries, but to close the gap between what they earn and the cost of basic goods. Research shows 82% of South African households are in debt, and that in the last quarter of 2025, household debt accounted for 61.8% of disposable income.
Alongside the cost of living crisis, is the unemployment crisis with 43.7% of working age South Africans unable to secure a job. Devastatingly, the face of poverty is still racialised 32 years into democracy, with 21% of Black South Africans living below the food poverty line of R855 and 75% living below the upper-bound poverty line of R2 846.
The cost of living crisis is not an accident. It is a result of decisions that can be overturned by those in power. Government controls electricity and water tariffs as well as the fuel levy, while employers have the power to pay better wages that cater for the rising cost of living.
The Federation is demanding the following from them:
- Enforcement of the National Minimum Wage and progression towards a living wage.
- Employers must pay workers a living wage and increases to protect their meagre wages from inflation.
- More labour inspectors
- Expand the Presidential Employment Stimulus to provide a path to employment for millions of unemployed youths.
- Increased social grants and for the Social Relief of Distress grant to be raised to the food poverty line and eventually transformed into a Universal Basic Income Grant.
- Reduction in electricity and water prices
- Lower fuel and food prices
- End austerity and extend the social wage
- Regulate healthcare prices, medical aid premium increases and implement the NHI
- Reserve Bank must halt repo rate increases
COSATU calls on workers and members of society to join the various marches and pickets across the country to declare; workers and society can no longer bear the brunt of austerity policy choices by government and greedy profiteering by private companies. Enough is enough!
Issued by COSATU
Zanele Sabela (COSATU Spokesperson)
Mobile: 079 287 5788 / 077 600 6639
Email: zaneles@cosatu.org.za